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Life at Peril: Illegal Downloads

File downloading on the internet comes along with an abundant of risks as revealed by the University of Ballarat. Researchers also considered content downloaded from one of the two famous links to be corrupt, as per news published in the Courier on September 13, 2011.

As discovered by researchers, almost 50% of internet links contain malicious content that can be employed towards accessing personal data.

According to Director of the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, Dr Paul Watters, downloading of malicious link from the internet gives direct access to cyber criminals, as per the news in Courier on September 13, 2011.

For instance, as Dr Watters described, downloading of movies also has serious implications as actually, one might end up downloading malicious content containing spiteful malware harmful for one's system.

However, Dr Watters recommended that research in this aspect could further facilitate into construction of future policy and laws advantageous for the whole population.

Furthermore, he also substantiated that as a result of this significant change in current batch of research, ways to understand the distinction between real and fake files have opened up.

In this method, information from BitTorrent trackers are extracted first and this information are later combined with external sources to find filename information and its legitimacy values.

The research explored that about 98% of BitTorrent usage in samples were nefarious, as they were either faked files, infringed with copyright or had a criminal connection. 97% of the content was popular for not containing fake files but for copyright infringement.

However, while commenting on this matter, security experts held the view that piracy on BitTorrent networks is quite a common problem.

The ICSL project is a collaborated project comprised of the University of Ballarat, the Victorian Government, IBM, Westpac, and the Federal Police. However, the current project was funded partially by Village Roadshow.

Moreover, security experts recommended that people should be really conscious about the websites they are visiting or downloading for future safety. They are further advised to use authentic software as well since pirated software carries greater risk of identity theft from a computer.

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